R

Karl Rexer of Rexer Analytics is at Predictive Analytics World this week (as am I) and he gave some quick highlights from the 2017 Rexer Analytics Data Science Survey. They’ve been doing survey since 2007 (and I have blogged about it regularly) and the 2017 is the 8th survey with 1,123 responses from 91 countries. Full [...]

SAS Decision Manager is SAS’ platform for decision automation and is getting a significant update in December 2017. I wrote a product review of SAS Decision Manager in 2014 and a number of things have changed in the new release, which is on the new SAS Platform and leverages new SAS Viya technologies. SAS Decision [...]

Open Data Group is an analytic deployment company. The company was started over 10 years ago and has transitioned from consulting to a product company, applying their expertise in Data Science and IT to create an analytic engine, FastScore. Successful analytics require organizational alignment (specifically between Data Science and IT) to create coordination of systems [...]

One of the announcements at IBM’s World of Watson is of the new Watson Machine Learning Service. I got a chance to ask a few questions about this new capability. A couple of key elements emerged regarding the current platform and the immediate announcement. First, some context. The Watson Data Platform (also announced at World of [...]

I recently got a chance to catch up with the IBM SPSS team for an update. Analytics, in IBM’s view and mine, are increasingly necessary as digitization increases the scale of business data and digital disruptors increase the difficulty of making good decisions. For those being disrupted analytics offers a powerful way to fight back. [...]

This was my first briefing on Statistica since I reviewed v11 in 2012. Statsoft was established in 1984 and acquired by Dell in March 2014. The product has been continuously developed to the point where it has over 16,000 integrated functions. Since acquisition, Dell has been focused on integrating it into Dell systems and processes [...]

Last session of the day is a freeform executive Q&A so I will just list bullet points as they come up: Open Source R is obviously a hot topic in analytics and SAS’ focus on more open APIs that are broadly accessible and their renewed focus on academic partnerships are designed to “leave R in the [...]

Next up at the SAS Inside Intelligence event are some technology highlights, each based around a day in the life of a particular role. Much of this is under NDA of course. Ryan Schmiedl kicked off with a quick recap of last year’s technology – 150 significant releases across the SAS focus areas. In analytics for instance Factory [...]

I am at the SAS Inside Intelligence event in Steamboat getting the annual update on all things SAS. First session of the day is the Executive Viewpoint. Jim Goodnight and Randy Guard kicked things off. Creating a single global organization was a big part of last year with legal, finance, sales, marketing and more becoming global [...]

Predictive analytics is a powerful tool for managing risk, reducing fraud and maximizing customer value. Those already succeeding with predictive analytics are looking for ways to scale and speed up their programs and make predictive analytics pervasive. But they know there is often a huge gap between having analytic insight and deriving business value from it – predictive [...]

I have just finished updating Enterprise Scale Analytics with R with new data from the Rexer Analytics Survey for 2015. As R has become more popular, the role of analytics has become increasingly important to organizations of every size. Increasingly, the focus is on enterprise-scale analytics—using advanced, predictive analytics to improve every decision across the [...]

I last got an update from Dataiku in November of 2014. Since then they have raised money and opened an office in New York. New features and capabilities have been added to the product and they are seeing good interest in the product from US customers as they expand here. The 2.0 version has been [...]

Day two of the Teradata Influencers event started with Hermann Wimmer, co-president. Hermann gave us an introduction to the overall company strategy. Teradata has two co-presidents, one focused on data and analytics and one focused on marketing applications with some shared services. This allows them to focus on the three markets there see for their [...]

It’s been a while since I last got an update on RapidMiner (RapidMiner 6 was the last version I reviewed) and they have some new positioning and product capabilities I wanted to catch up on. RapidMiner began as an open source product company founded in 2007. They moved to Open Core in 2010 and now [...]

I last got an update on SPSS early last year. In March 2015, IBM released an update for the complete set of products in its advanced analytical portfolio. Analytical Decision Management (ADM) is positioned as part of this portfolio of predictive and prescriptive analytic tools. IBM’s advanced analytic portfolio is focused on having meaningful impact [...]

FICO Analytic Modeler is FICO’s in-browser analytic tool suite – the evolution of the Model Builder product line post the InfoCentricity acquisition. These offerings are part of the FICO Analytic Cloud, a cloud-based environment for building and managing analytic models and deploying analytics into decisioning applications. It also features a marketplace for analytic solutions. The [...]

I recently did some research on the requirements for enterprise-scale analytics and the challenges of using open source R in this context. In my first post (Requirements for Enterprise Scale Analytics with R – Part 1) I outline some of the requirements I see for enterprise scale analytics. In this second post I will discuss the challenges of R [...]

I am giving a webinar Up Your R Game with Bill Franks of Teradata on July 29th at 1pm Eastern time: Open source R is no longer a fad or a tool used in the academic world. According to the Rexer survey,* R is the analytic software of choice for data scientists, business analysts, and data [...]

While R has become very popular in recent years the fact remains that as an open source product it has some scalability and performance issues (discussed in our paper on Standards in Predictive Analytics for instance). Base open source R is not really designed for the kind of large data volumes, Big Data, that are [...]

The Hurwitz Group just published their Victory Index for Predictive Analytics. This is a great report on the core predictive analytic vendors written by Marcia Kaufman and Daniel Kirsch. The report covers Angoss, IBM, Megaputer, Pegasystems, Predixion, RapidMiner, Revolution Analytics, SAS, SAP, StatSoft. The report aims to assess four things about each vendor: Vision – how good the company’s strategy [...]